War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Of the birth of subgenres, there is no end. They arise like bubbles full of miraculous hopes and potentials from the Planckian… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Jeff VanderMeer's fiction has always been entrancingly, engagingly, enthusiastically weird, a winning combination of mimesis and the fantastical that privileges neither component:… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
The constituents of tragedy may be universally acknowledged, easily invoked and deeply felt, but the elements of comedy are, I think, more… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
I suspect that authors who start their careers writing for an adult audience - and who eventually produce a young adult novel… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
The three touchstones that woke Buddha up - sickness, old age, and death - are a pretty good place to start when… — Paul Di Filippo Age Copy Share Image
It's certainly a cliche to remark that a nonfiction book 'reads just like a novel,' but in the case of Jonathan Eig's… — Paul Di Filippo Birth Copy Share Image
The science-fictional motif of lethal, infectious information - bad memes - is a fascinating one, with an extended history. One of the… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Quite often, intent on conveying how things can go wrong for a culture (science fiction) or an individual (horror) or all of… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
'James and the Giant Peach' magnificently starts out Dahl's career as a blithe and droll Bad Uncle corrupter and affirmer of youth.… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
It is truly bracing and instructive to contemplate the End Times - at least at safe remove, in the pages of fiction… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Generally speaking, by the time a subculture such as steampunk secures the attention of major media, resulting in extensive coverage of the… — Paul Di Filippo Attention Copy Share Image
The impossibility of a sequel ever recapturing everything - or anything - about its ancestor never stopped legions of writers from trying,… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Consensus wisdom has it that all modern commercial fantasy novels fall into two camps: those derived from J.R.R. Tolkien and those derived… — Paul Di Filippo Books Copy Share Image
The advent of AIDS circa 1980 has really forced medicine and biology to take enormous steps just for sheer survival. The same… — Paul Di Filippo Advent Copy Share Image
Only a minority of science fiction dystopias attempt to plumb the real existential roots of oppression, the flaws in humanity's nature that… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and… — Paul Di Filippo Authors Copy Share Image
Just as our solar system has a certain idiosyncratic assortment of planets and moons, different from any neighboring system yet categorically equivalent,… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Stephen King consummately honors several traditions with his rare paperback original, 'Joyland.' He addresses the novel of carny life and sideshows, where… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Sometimes magnificent visual art takes root in the humblest of soils. Advertisements painted on old barns, tattoos, fruit crate labels, hot rod… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Science offers no brief for the telekinetic powers of Darth Vader and hardly any greater justification for the faster-than-light travel that makes… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Certainly the highest posthumous praise that can be conferred upon any writer is the assertion that his or her writing permanently altered… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Critics, at least generally, want to regard works of fiction as independent entities, whose virtues and failures must be reckoned apart from… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views -… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
I think humanity is not wise enough to know what genotype or somatype is going to be the most successful or the… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
The entire Internet, as well as the types of devices represented by the desktop computer, the laptop computer, the iPhone, the iPod,… — Paul Di Filippo Ability Copy Share Image
Once anthropology and geology had opened up the pre-recordkeeping darkness of humanity's long, slow, sustained infancy as suitable grounds for speculation, writers… — Paul Di Filippo Anthropology Copy Share Image
We've come a long way since 'Beowulf.' In the twentieth century, a strain in children's and YA literature offered the humorously conceived… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
